The recognition may be decades overdue, but the appreciation and honor will be no less significant when the B'nai B'rith World Center confers the Jewish Rescuers Citation on Berta Davidovitz Rubinsztejn and Gyorgy (Yitzhak) Gyuri, Holocaust heroes who operated in Nazi-occupied Hungary.

The Jewish Rescuers Citation was established in 2011 by the Committee to Recognize the Heroism of Jews who Rescued Fellow Jews During the Holocaust and B’nai B’rith World Center to set right the historic record – that thousands of Jews were active in rescue efforts throughout Europe, putting their own lives at risk in order to save other Jews from deportation, hunger and death at the hands of the Nazis and their collaborators.

To date, nearly 100 citations have been presented to rescuers who operated in France, Germany, the Netherlands, Greece and Hungary.

“We are proud to honor these two Jewish heroes and gratified that through our decade-long efforts there is growing acknowledgment that their recognition as models for Jewish and human solidarity is long overdue,” said Alan Schneider, director of the B’nai B’rith World Center and a founding member of the JRJ Committee.

Rubinsztejn, 92, was born in Poland and fled with her family across the Carpathian Mountains into still-unoccupied Hungary.

In 1942, Rubinsztejn made her way to Budapest, where she joined the Zionist youth movement Habonim Dror, volunteering to participate in its underground rescue activities.

She and other Habonim Dror members assumed a Gentile identity, and met in a park to plan operations and weapons smuggling.

As Rudolf Kastner – a leader of the Jewish Aid and Rescue Committee – negotiated the departure of a train-load of Jews from German-occupied Hungary to neutral Switzerland in 1944 with SS officer Adolf Eichmann, the goal of the organization became to put as many orphaned children onto the train after identifying them in the streets of Budapest.